Archive for the ‘Language’ Category

People tout many different goals in the educational enterprise, but not all goals are created equal. They require a good deal of sifting, and some should be discarded. Many of them seem to be either obvious on the one hand or, on the other, completely wrong-headed (to my way of thinking, at least).

One of the most improbable goals one could posit, however, would be failure. Yet failure — not as an end (and hence not a final goal), but as an essential and salutary means to achieving a real education — is the subject of Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure (New York, HarperCollins, 2015). In all fairness, I guess I was predisposed to like what she had to say, since she’s a teacher of both English and Latin, but I genuinely think that it is one of the more trenchant critiques I have read of modern pedagogy and the child-rearing approaches that have helped shape it, sometimes with the complicity of teachers, and sometimes in spite of their best efforts.

Christe first drew my attention to an extract of her book at The Atlantic here. When we conferred after reading it, we discovered that we’d both been sufficiently impressed that we’d each ordered a copy of the book.

Lahey calls into question, first and foremost, the notion that the student (whether younger or older) really needs to feel that he or she is doing well at all stages of the process. Feeling good about your achievement, whether or not it really amounts to anything, is not in fact a particularly useful thing. That seems common-sensical to me, but it has for some time gone against the grain of a good deal of teaching theory. Instead, Lahey argues, failing — and in the process learning to get up again, and throw oneself back into the task at hand — is not only beneficial to a student, but essential to the formation of any kind of adult autonomy. Insofar as education is not merely about achieving a certain number of grades and scores, but about the actual formation of characer, this is (I think) spot-on.

A good deal of her discussion is centered around the sharply diminishing value of any system of extrinsic reward — that is, anything attached secondarily to the process of learning — be it grades on a paper or a report card, a monetary payoff from parents for good grades, or the often illusory goal of getting into a good college. The only real reward for learning something, she insists, is knowing it. She has articulated better than I have a number of things I’ve tried to express before. (On the notion that the reason to learn Latin and Greek was not as a stepping-stone to something else, but really to know Latin and Greek, see here and here. On allowing the student freedom to fail, see here. On grades, see here.) Education should be — and arguably can only be — about learning, not about grades, and about mastery, not about serving time, passing tests so that one can be certified or bumped along to something else. In meticulous detail, Lahey documents the uselessness of extrinsic rewards at almost every level — not merely because they fail to achieve the desired result, but because they drag the student away from engagement in learning, dull the mind and sensitivity, and effectively promote the ongoing infantilization of our adolescents — making sure that they are never directly exposed to the real and natural consequences of either their successes or their failures. Put differently, unless you can fail, you can’t really succeed either.

Rather than merely being content to denounce the inadequacies of modern pedagogy, Ms. Lahey has concrete suggestions for how to turn things around. She honestly reports how she has had to do so herself in her ways of dealing with her own children. The book is graciously honest, and I enthusiastically recommend it to parents and teachers at every level. If I haven’t convinced you this far, though, at least read the excerpt linked above. The kind of learning she’s talking about — engaged learning tied to a real love of learning, coupled with the humility to take the occasional setback not as an invalidation of oneself but as a challenge to grow into something tougher — is precisely what we’re hoping to cultivate at Scholars Online. If that’s what you’re looking for, I hope we can provide it.

Nearly two years ago, disquieting rumors hit my work group: our jobs were moving out of the area, across the country.

I did not want to move out of my home, away from my friends and family, or face restarting our home business in another state, especially since I would just be trading one earthquake zone for another one, but one with worse winters, more flooding, and tornadoes. So I let my bosses know that I wouldn’t be following my work assignment backwards along the Oregon Trail, and starting thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

As usually when requiring clarity of thought, I turned to Dorothy Sayers, who recounts in one of her addresses how she came to learn Latin:

“I was rising seven when [my father] appeared one morning in the nursery, holding in his hand a shabby black book, which had already seen some service, and addressed to me the following memorable words: “I think, my dear, that you are now old enough to begin to learn Latin.” … I was by no means unwilling, because it seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Latin, and would place me in a position of superiority to my mother, my aunt, and my nurse-though not to my paternal grandmother, who was an old lady of parts, and had at least a nodding acquaintance with the language.”

I already know a little Latin, but I do not know classical Greek. My husband does, and my children do, so far from being in a position of superiority to my own children, I am somewhat at a disadvantage when they talk about finer points of Homer’s style, or the interpretation of a passage from Luke. It seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Greek, and would place me on something of a more level position with my husband and my children, at least, so far as classical languages are concerned.

Besides, there are some Byzantine commentaries by John Philoponus and John of Damascus on Aristotle’s de Caelo that I ran across when researching my dissertation on medieval astronomy forty years ago, and I have never been able to read them, since the only available printed editions are in Greek and 19th century philosophical German. Of the two, Greek seemed easier to master.

I happened to mention my sort of vague yearning to start classical Greek to a few friends and some family members. This may have been a mistake, but it’s too late now. Scholars Online posted its Greek I course for 2016-2017, and I enrolled, thus putting an end to well-meant but incessant encouragement that I actually indulge myself in the joys of ancient Greek. Mr. Dean kindly agreed to accept me into his course.

It’s been interesting, to say the least.

Latin has seven noun cases, forms of nouns that indicate how they will be used in a sentence as subject, direct object, indirect object, and so on (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, and vocative). Greek has five, lacking the ablative and locative, whose functions still exist but are rolled into one or another of the other cases. Plowing through the explanations in Unit I, I thought, this I can do: Greek is simpler is simpler than Latin!

So for the first unit, I put my time into learning paradigms for three nouns: a first declension feminine: ἡ ἀρχή: beginning, from which we get the English words “archaic” and “archeology”; the second declension masculine ὁ λόγος, word, from which we get “logic” and “theology”; and a mixed bag word which could be either masculine or feminine — you have to pay attention to the attached article: ὁ θεός, ἡ θεός, god or goddess.

I’m sure those of you reading this who know some Greek are mentally nudging one another with barely-disguised glee, the kind novelists invoke with the well-worn phrase “little did she know….” Yes, the plot twist is coming.

With the next unit, we hit the verbs. Greek has all the Latin tenses, plus one more. It has all the Latin verb moods, plus one more. It has an extra voice. It even has an extra number, distinguishing between singular, plural, and dual (just two). That’s a lot of verb forms to learn.

Let me spare you the details, but for the first time since I was in high school, there are 3×5 cards in stacks all over the house, wherever I happened to leave a set the last time I found a few minutes to study, minutes that usually add up to at least an hour every day. The ones with green edges have the principal parts of verbs, the ones with yellow edges give the cases for nouns and adjectives, the multicolored ones hold details on prepositions and which cases they take and how the meaning changes with the case. The blue-edged ones have grammar rules for conditional phrases with wonderful names like “future more vivid”, clauses of purpose with different levels of purposefulness, summaries of all possible endings, and rules for accents that give new meaning to the concept of mathematical chaos. I’m sure there’s a connection, since my teachers insist there’s a pattern even if I can’t find it. The blue-edged cards are the most bent and draggled of the bunch, because for some reason, I can’t keep straight whether the future passive indicative uses the un-augmented aorist stem or the augmented perfect stem with an extra syllable thrown in so you don’t confuse it with the perfect passive, and I have to look up which verb stem is used when, even if I remember the six stems and the proper endings for the tense and mood and voice in question.

There was a time when I thought sequence of moods meant something like the sequence of emotional states on getting a new software program that doesn’t quite do everything you hoped — anticipation, joy, frustration, resignation. Now I realize the “sequence of moods” depends on the verb tense used in the independent clause to govern the tense in the subordinate clause. There is probably some philosophical observation to be made there, but at the moment, I’m just trying to keep my tenses straight. I sometimes feel that if I manage to get the pluperfect endings lodged firmly in my head, the aorist ones will fall out the other side.

But there is more to learning a language than memorizing forms or appreciating its contributions to one’s own native vocabulary. The next step is translation, and while forms may be approached with rigorous method (even if there are lots of niggling details), translating is rarely straightforward.

That’s because words don’t just have meaning in some one-to-one correspondence between languages, any more than chartreuse, lime, Kelly, or Lincoln all mean the same green, even though they all mean “green” at some level.

After centuries of use in philosophical, scientific, and theological works, ἀρχή and λόγος have become loaded terms in Greek, words that absolutely defy a one-word decoding translation.

ἀρχή can mean beginning, or the first principles or elements on which all else is built, or the source of power, and by extension an empire, realm, authority, or even command.

λόγος can mean the story one tells in words, a speech one makes — that is, the spoken-out-loud-word that stirs others to action (one of Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion), or the reason why one does something, or the root or basis behind an action.

θεός is more direct: it unambiguously means a god, a deity; it cannot be used for something merely divine or spiritually-inclined.

We did a lot of sentences with the vocabulary words in different situations, partly to learn the different forms, but also to gain by experience appreciation for the nuances of meaning.

Homer taught the men with words (using speech).

The poets teach well by means of stories (skillful use of rhetoric).

The young men learned skills with words (learned to reason clearly or speak clearly).

The messengers from the enemy destroyed the peace with words (of persuasion).

On December 24, I could sit down and work out out the Gospel for the first Eucharist of Christmas in Greek: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος.

I know the English translation, “in the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”, but the Greek means more than that, so the author of John meant more than the plain English. In a word-for-word translation, the text arrives in English naked, stripped of all the nuances the author surely reasoned out when he chose those words to begin his story and lay out the foundations of his faith so long ago.

And that’s the reason for learning Greek: to read and recognize what Homer and Aristotle, Herodotus and Sophocles, Plato and the authors of the New Testament really said, and to get closer to what they still have to say to us today, in all its complexity.

Learning Greek is hard work, and that’s okay. Learning anything, and learning it well is hard work. It takes time and effort and repetition and review and thought and puzzlement and clarification.

I make lots of mistakes, and that’s okay, too. My mistakes in class provide harmless amusement to my teacher and classmates and they don’t hurt me. In fact, I usually remember the points I’ve flubbed better over the long run than the ones I somehow, and often accidentally, got right the first time.

But the very best part of my own personal Greek journey is something I haven’t mentioned yet: my teacher was once one of our own students.

And for a teacher, it doesn’t get much better than this: to sit at the feet of your own student, and learn something new.

Everywhere we see extravagant public handwringing about education. Something is not working. The economy seems to be the symptom that garners the most attention, and there are people across the political spectrum who want to fix it directly; but most seem to agree that education is at least an important piece of the solution. We must produce competitive workers for the twenty-first century, proclaim the banners and headlines; if we do not, the United States will become a third-world nation. We need to get education on the fast track — education that is edgy, aggressive, and technologically savvy. Whatever else it is, it must be up to date, it must be fast, and it must be modern. It must not be what we have been doing.

I’m a Latin teacher. If I were a standup comedian, that would be considered a punch line. In addition to Latin, I teach literature — much of it hundreds of years old. I ask students, improbably, to see it for what it itself is, not just for what they can use it for themselves. What’s the point of that? one might ask. Things need to be made relevant to them, not the other way around, don’t they?

Being a Latin teacher, however (among other things), I have gone for a number of years now to the Summer Institute of the American Classical League, made up largely of Latin teachers across the country. One might expect them to be stubbornly resistant to these concerns — or perhaps blandly oblivious. That’s far from the case. Every year, in between the discussions of Latin and Greek literature and history, there are far more devoted to pedagogy: how to make Latin relevant to the needs of the twenty-first century, how to advance the goals of STEM education using classical languages, and how to utilize the available technology in the latest and greatest ways. What that technology does or does not do is of some interest, but the most important thing for many there is that it be new and catchy and up to date. Only that way can we hope to engage our ever-so-modern students.

The accrediting body that reviewed our curricular offerings at Scholars Online supplies a torrent of exortation about preparing our students for twenty-first century jobs by providing them with the latest skills. It’s obvious enough that the ones they have now aren’t doing the trick, since so many people are out of work, and so many of those who are employed seem to be in dead-end positions. The way out of our social and cultural morass lies, we are told, in a focus on the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Providing students with job skills is the main business of education. They need to be made employable. They need to be able to become wealthy, because that’s how our society understands, recognizes, and rewards worth. We pay lip service, but little else, to other standards of value.

The Sarah D. Barder Fellowship organization to which I also belong is a branch of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. It’s devoted to gifted and highly gifted education. At their annual conference they continue to push for skills, chiefly in the scientific and technical areas, to make our students competitive in the emergent job market. The highly gifted ought to be highly employable and hence earn high incomes. That’s what it means, isn’t it?

The politicians of both parties have contrived to disagree about almost everything, but they seem to agree about this. In January of 2014, President Barack Obama commented, “…I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. So I don’t want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I’m just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need.”

From the other side of the aisle, Florida Governor Rick Scott said, “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

They’re both, of course, right. The problem isn’t that they have come up with the wrong answer. It isn’t even that they’re asking the wrong question. It’s that they’re asking only one of several relevant questions. They have drawn entirely correct conclusions from their premises. A well-trained plumber with a twelfth-grade education (or less) can make more money than I ever will as a Ph.D. That has been obvious for some time now. If I needed any reminding, the last time we required a plumber’s service, the point was amply reinforced: the two of them walked away in a day with about what I make in a month. It’s true, too, that a supply of anthropologists is not, on the face of things, serving the “compelling interests” of the state of Florida (or any other state, probably). In all fairness, President Obama said that he wasn’t talking about the value of art history as such, but merely its value in the job market. All the same, that he was dealing with the job market as the chief index of an education’s value is symptomatic of our culture’s expectations about education and its understanding of what it’s for.

The politicians haven’t created the problem; but they have bought, and are now helping to articulate further, the prevalent assessment of what ends are worth pursuing, and, by sheer repetition and emphasis, crowding the others out. I’m not at all against STEM subjects, nor am I against technologically competent workers. I use and enjoy technology. I am not intimidated by it. I teach online. I’ve been using the Internet for twenty-odd years. I buy a fantastic range of products online. I programmed the chat software I use to teach Latin and Greek, using PHP, JavaScript, and mySQL. I’m a registered Apple Developer. I think every literate person should know not only some Latin and Greek, but also some algebra and geometry. I even think, when going through Thucydides’ description of how the Plataeans determined the height of the wall the Thebans had built around their city, “This would be so much easier if they just applied a little trigonometry.” Everyone should know how to program a computer. Those are all good things, and help us understand the world we’re living in, whether we use them for work or not.

But they are not all that we need to know. So before you quietly determine that what I’m offering is just irrelevant, allow me to bring some news from the past. If that sounds contradictory, bear in mind that it’s really the only kind of news there is. All we know about anything at all, we know from the past, whether recent or distant. Everything in the paper or on the radio news is already in the past. Every idea we have has been formulated based on already-accumulated evidence and already-completed ratiocination. We may think we are looking at the future, but we aren’t: we’re at most observing the trends of the recent past and hypothesizing about what the future will be like. What I have to say is news, not because it’s about late-breaking happenings, but because it seems not to be widely known. The unsettling truth is that if we understood the past better and more deeply, we might be less sanguine about trusting the apparent trends of a year or even a decade as predictors of the future. They do not define our course into the infinite future, or even necessarily the short term — be they about job creation, technical developments, or weather patterns. We are no more able to envision the global culture and economy of 2050 than the independent bookseller in 1980 could have predicted that a company named Amazon would put him out of business by 2015.

So here’s my news: if the United States becomes a third-world nation (a distinct possibility), it will not be because of a failure in our technology, or even in our technological education. It will be because, in our headlong pursuit of what glitters, we have forgotten how to differentiate value from price: we have forgotten how to be a free people. Citizenship — not merely in terms of law and government, but the whole spectrum of activities involved in evaluating and making decisions about what kind of people to be, collectively and individually — is not a STEM subject. Our ability to articulate and grasp values, and to make reasoned and well-informed decisions at the polls, in the workplace, and in our families, cannot be transmitted by a simple, repeatable process. Nor can achievement in citizenship be assessed simply, or, in the short term, accurately at all. The successes and failures of the polity as a whole, and of the citizens individually, will remain for the next generation to identify and evaluate — if we have left them tools equal to the task. Our human achievement cannot be measured by lines of code, by units of product off the assembly line, or by GNP. Our competence in the business of being human cannot be certified like competence in Java or Oracle (or, for that matter, plumbing). Even a success does not necessarily hold out much prospect of employment or material advantage, because that was never what it was about in the first place. It offers only the elusive hope that we will have spent our stock of days with meaning — measured not by our net worth when we die, but by what we have contributed when we’re alive. The questions we encounter in this arena are not new ones, but rather old ones. If we lose sight of them, however, we will have left every child behind, for technocracy can offer nothing to redirect our attention to what matters.

Is learning this material of compelling interest to the state? That depends on what you think the state is. The state as a bureaucratic organism is capable of getting along just fine with drones that don’t ask any inconvenient questions. We’re already well on the way to achieving that kind of state. Noam Chomsky, ever a firebrand and not a man with whom I invariably agree, trenchantly pointed out, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” He’s right. If we are to become unfree people, it will be because we gave our freedom away in exchange for material security or some other ephemeral reward — an illusion of safety and welfare, and those same jobs that President Obama and Governor Scott have tacitly accepted as the chief — or perhaps the only — real objects of our educational system. Whatever lies outside that narrow band of approved material is an object of ridicule.

If the state is the people who make it up, the question is subtly but massively different. Real education may not be in the compelling interest of the state qua state, but it is in the compelling interest of the people. It’s the unique and unfathomably complex amalgam that each person forges out of personal reflection, of coming to understand one’s place in the family, in the nation, and in the world. It is not primarily practical, and we should eschew it altogether, if our highest goal were merely to get along materially. The only reason to value it is the belief that there is some meaning to life beyond one’s bank balance and material comfort. I cannot prove that there is, and the vocabulary of the market has done its best to be rid of the idea. But I will cling to it while I live, because I think it’s what makes that life worthwhile.

Technical skills — job skills of any sort — are means, among others, to the well-lived life. They are even useful means in their place, and everyone should become as competent as possible. But as they are means, they are definitionally not ends in themselves. They can be mistakenly viewed as ends in themselves, and sold to the credulous as such, but the traffic is fraudulent, and it corrupts the good that is being conveyed. Wherever that sale is going on, it’s because the real ends are being quietly bought up by those with the power to keep them out of our view in their own interest.

Approximately 1900 years ago, Tacitus wrote of a sea change in another civilization that had happened not by cataclysm but through inattention to what really mattered. Describing the state of Rome at the end of the reign of Augustus, he wrote: “At home all was calm. The officials carried the old names; the younger men had been born after the victory of Actium; most even of the elder generation, during the civil wars; few indeed were left who had seen the Republic. It was thus an altered world, and of the old, unspoilt Roman character not a trace lingered.” It takes but a single generation to forget the work of ages.

But perhaps that’s an old story, and terribly out of date. I teach Latin, Greek, literature, and history, after all.

Congratulations to Mrs. Mary Catherine Lavissière’s students Katie Cruse, Alana Ross, Micah Wittenberg, and Moriah Wittenberg! These four Scholars Online students placed with honors in the National French Test Le Grand Concours 2015. The test is offered annually by the American Association of Teachers of French to identify and recognize students achieving high proficiency in the French language.

Madame Lavissière offers courses in both French and Spanish through Scholars Online. See our Modern Languages course descriptions for more information. Update on Summer Session Courses for 2015

We’ve added several new courses for the summer session, which runs from June 8-August 21, 2015 (individual courses may span different periods within the session, so check your course description for exact start dates). Most summer classes are chances for students to build new skills in fun but still useful ways. Click on the course name to see descriptions of class schedules and costs, and on syllabus links to see detailed course content and assignments. Enrollment must be completed by May 31 to ensure placement in the course, and payment in full is due before students can attend chat sessions. Enrollments received after May 31 may not be processed in time for students to attend the first sessions of their course.

Explore the many facets of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation in Looking at Middle-earth. Discussions will focus on Tolkien’s world-building, use of language, his theology of “subcreation”, and his work as a philologist. Students are expected to have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Sample Shakespeare’s comedy, tragedy, and history plays, including Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew,The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II in Summer Shakespeare I. Students taking Scholars Online’s literature series, supplemented with Summer Shakespeare II and III, have the opportunity to study and discuss all of Shakespeare’s plays. [See the Full Syllabus for details.]

Gain practical writing skills with Molding Your Prose (based on an idea suggested to Dr. Bruce McMenomy by Mary McDermott Shideler). Learn to organize your ideas and improve your dialectic skills in Molding your Argument. Both of these popular courses requires short weekly writing exercises, with students analyzing each others’ work to learn to identify and improve their own writing.

Jump start your academic year Physics course with an overview of key theories and concepts in Introduction to Physics, a survey of the fundamental concepts of classical mechanics and modern physics, and gain essential analysis and problem-solving skills. Students planning to take the combined AP Physics 1 and 2 course will be able to count lab work from this course toward their AP lab requirements. [Full syllabus]

NEW COURSE! In The Age of Reagan, discover how the events and decisions of the Reagan administration have shaped current political, religious, economic, and environmental policies. Students opting for the media studies component of this course will also examine how movies, TV, and ads portray cultural messages (parental guide available in the full syllabus).

I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.
— Winston Churchill (somewhat out of context).

A few years ago I wrote an entry on this blog entitled “Why Study Latin?” It was a distillation of my own thoughts about the actual benefits of learning Latin — and the benefits one ought legitimately to expect from doing so. I tried to distinguish the real benefits from other phantom benefits that might not be, in and of themselves, fully valid reasons for undertaking the study. Not everyone agreed, but in general I stand by what I said there. From my point of view, the chief reason to learn Latin is to be able to read Latin; a significant second is to gain that unique way of looking at the world that attends that ability. One has access to a number of great works of Latin literature in their original forms, therefore, and one has also an enhanced ability to think in Latinate terms.

Of course other collateral benefits might reasonably accrue, but they are neither absolutely guaranteed to the student of Latin, nor are they benefits that attend Latin study exclusively. Dr. Karl Maurer of the University of Dallas suggested that I didn’t sufficiently credit the advantages a trained Latinist would have in reading older English — and he’s definitely right that this kind of textural depth of English poetry and prose will probably elude anyone who isn’t familiar with Latin, and the way Latin education was a cornerstone of English education from about 1500 to at least 1900. I certainly don’t disagree with his claims there; I don’t think they rank as matters of linguistics as much as matters of literary development and style. They’re still not trivial, however.

Be that as it may, for a variety of reasons, some of them right and some of them wrong, learning Latin has its champions, and I hope it gains a lot more. While I don’t agree with all the reasons one might advance for Latin study, I will enthusiastically concur that it’s a terrific thing to learn and to know.

Far fewer, however, champion learning Greek so loudly. For a variety of reasons, Greek is seen as far less significant. Some of those reasons are sound: Greek does not directly stand behind a broad range of modern Western European languages the way Latin does. Many of our ideas of statecraft and polity come from Greece, but most of them came through Latin in the process. Other reasons people shy away from Greek are fairly trivial. It has an odd-looking alphabet. Its literature seems to depend on a lot of odder assumptions. Realistic, though rather defeatist, is the fact that, in general, Greek is just considered tougher to learn. Many mainstream churches no longer even require their clergy to be able to read Greek (which seems preposterous to me, but that’s another matter).

For whatever reasons, Greek is certainly studied far less at the high school level than it once was. I read a statistic a few years ago suggesting that maybe a thousand students were actually studying ancient Greek in modern American high schools at any one time. The numbers may be as high as two thousand, but surely no higher than that. I don’t know whether those numbers have risen or fallen since I read it, but I certainly see no evidence that they have skyrocketed. I do occasionally run into a Latin teacher at the American Classical League Summer Institutes who teaches some Greek, but it’s most often a sideline, and often a completely optional “extra” for before or after school. Most of those students are being exposed to the Greek alphabet and some vocabulary, but fairly few of them are receiving a rigorous exposure to the grammar of Greek as a whole. If one narrows that to those who have studied real Classical Greek, as opposed to New Testament Greek, the numbers are probably smaller still.

For me most of the reasons for learning to read Greek are similar to those for reading Latin. The chief benefit, I would still insist, is to be able to read Greek literature in its original terms. Lucie Buisson wrote an eloquent defense of Homer in Greek not long ago in this blog. You cannot acquire a perspective on the Homeric poems like Lucie’s without reading them in Greek. It’s a huge deal: something snaps into view in a way that just cannot be explained to someone who hasn’t experienced it. No translation, no matter how good, can capture it for you. Though Keats memorably thanked Chapman for something like this eye-opening experience, the fact remains that Keats didn’t have the real thing as a comparandum. Chapman’s Homer is terrific — but Homer’s Homer is better.

Beyond the immediate experience of the literary objects themselves there is the fact that Greek provides its students with what I can only (metaphorically) call another set of eyes — that is, a different way of seeing the world, with different categories of thought that run deeper than mere changes in vocabulary. Virtually any new language one learns will provide that kind of new perspective: French, Spanish, or German will do so; Latin certainly does. I would suggest that Greek provides a uniquely valuable set precisely because it is further removed from English in its basic terms.

A reasonable command of multiple languages gives us what might be likened to stereoscopic vision. One eye, or one point of view, may be able to see a great deal — but it’s still limited because it’s looking from one position. A second eye, set some distance from the first, may allow us to see a somewhat enlarged field of view, but its real benefit is that it allows us, by the uncannily accurate trigonometric processor resident in our brains, to apprehend things in three dimensions. Images that are flat to one eye achieve depth with two, and we perceive their solidity as we never could do otherwise. Something similar goes on with an array of telescope dishes spread out over a distance on the earth — they allow, by exploiting even relatively slight amount of parallax in cosmic terms, an enhanced apprehension of depth in space. (Yes, there are also some other advantages having to do with resolution — all analogies have their limits.)

I would argue that every new language one learns will thus provide another point of view, enhancing and enriching, by a kind of analogical stereoscopy, a deeper and more penetrating view of the world. And like the more widely spaced eyes, or the telescopes strung out in a very large array, the further apart they are, the more powerfully their “parallax” (to speak purely analogically) will work upon us. This, I would argue, is one of the chief reasons for learning Greek. In some of its most fundamental assumptions, Greek is more sharply distinct from English than is Latin. A few examples will have to suffice.

Greek, for example, invites us to think about time differently. Greek verb tenses are not as much about absolute time as English verb tenses are; they are more about what linguists call aspect (or aspect of action in older writings). That is, they have more to do with the shape of an action — not its intrinsic shape, but how we’re talking about it — than merely locating it in the past, present, or future. Greek has a tense — the aorist — that English and Latin are missing. The aorist is used in the indicative mood to denote simple action in the past, but in other moods to express other encapsulation of simple verb action. Greek aorist verbs in the indicative will certainly locate events in the temporal continuum, and certainly English also has ways to express aspect — things such as the progressive or emphatic verb forms: e.g., “I run” vs. “I am running” or “I do run”. But whereas the English verb is chiefly centered in the idea of when something happened or is happening or will happen, with aspect being somewhat secondary, in Greek it’s the other way around. What exactly that does to the way Greek speakers and thinkers see the world is probably impossible to nail down exactly — but it’s not trivial.

Attic and earlier Greek has a whole mood of the verb that isn’t present in English or Latin — the optative. Students of New Testament Greek won’t see this on its own as a rule. There are a few examples such as Paul’s repeated μὴ γένοιτο in Romans (sometimes translated as “by no means”, but intrinsically meaning something more like “may it not come about”). But Attic and older dialects (like Homeric Greek) are loaded with it. It’s not just an arbitrary extension of a subjunctive idea: it runs alongside the subjunctive and plays parallel games with it in ways that defy simple classification.

Greek has a voice that neither English nor Latin knows, properly speaking — what is called the middle voice. It is neither active nor passive; but tends to refer to things acting on or on behalf of themselves, either reflexively or in a more convoluted way that defies any kind of classification in English language categories.

The Greek conditional sentence has a range of subtlety and nuance that dwarfs almost anything we have in English. Expressing a condition in Greek, or translating a condition from Greek, requires a very particular degree of attention to how the condition is doing what it is doing. In the present and the past, one may have either contrary to fact conditions (“If I were a rich man, I would have more staircases,” or “If I had brought an umbrella I would not have become so wet,”) general conditions (“If you push that button, a light goes on,”), and particular conditions (“If you have the older edition of the book, this paragraph is different”); in the future there are three other kinds of conditions, one of them nearly (but not quite) contrary to fact (“If you were to steal my diamonds, I’d be sad,”) called the future less vivid, and then a future more vivid and a future most vivid, representing increasing degrees of urgency in the future. All of these can be tweaked and modified and, in some rather athletic situations, mixed. If you study Greek, you will never think about conditions in quite the same way again.

Greek has what are called conditional temporal clauses that model themselves on conditions in terms of their verb usage, though they don’t actually take the form of a condition. There is something like this in English, but because we don’t use such a precise and distinct range of verbs for these clauses, they don’t show their similarities nearly as well.

The Greek participle is a powerhouse unlike any in any other Western language. Whole clauses and ideas for which we would require entire sentences can be packaged up with nuance and dexterity in participles and participial phrases. Because Greek participles have vastly more forms than English (which has only a perfect passive and a present active — “broken” and “breaking”) or than Latin (which has a perfect passive and a present active, and future active and passive forms), it can do vastly more. Greek participles have a variety of tenses, they can appear in active, middle, and passive voices, and they are inflected for all cases, numbers, and genders. All of these will affect the way one apprehends these nuggets of meaning in the language.

Those are only some examples of how a Greek sentence enforces a subtly different pattern of thought upon people who are dealing with it. As I said, however, for me the real treasure is in seeing these things in action, and seeing the ideas that arise through and in these expressions. So what’s so special as to require to be read in Greek?

Lucie already has written thoroughly enough about the joys of Homer; much the same could be said of almost any of the other classical authors. Plato’s dialogues come alive with a witty, edgy repartee that mostly gets flattened in translation. The dazzling wordplay and terrifying rhythms of Euripidean choruses cannot be emulated in meaningful English. Herodotus’s meandering storytelling in his slightly twisted Ionic dialect is a piece of wayfaring all on its own. The list goes on.

For a Christian, of course, being able to read the New Testament in its original form is a very significant advantage. Those who have spent any time investigating what we do at Scholars Online will realize that this is perhaps an odd thing to bring up, since we don’t teach New Testament Greek as such. My rationale there is really quite simple: the marginal cost of learning classical Attic Greek is small enough, compared with its advantages, that there seems no point in learning merely the New Testament (koine) version of the language. Anyone who can read Attic Greek can handle the New Testament with virtually no trouble. Yes, there are a few different forms: some internal consonants are lost, so that γίγνομαι (gignomai) becomes γίνομαι (ginomai), and the like. Yes, some of the more elaborate constructions go away, and one has to get used to a range of conditions (for example) that is significantly diminished from the Attic models I talked about above. But none of this will really throw a student of Attic into a tailspin; the converse is not true. Someone trained in New Testament Greek can read only New Testament Greek. Homer, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides — all the treasures of the classical Greek tradition remain inaccessible. But the important contents of the New Testament and the early Greek church fathers is open even with this restricted subset of Greek — and they are very well worth reading.

Greek is not, as mentioned earlier, a very popular subject to take at the high school level, and it’s obvious that it’s one of those things that requires a real investment of time and effort. Nevertheless, it is one of the most rewarding things one can study, both for the intrinsic delights of reading Greek texts and for some of the new categories of thought it will open up. For the truly exceptional student it can go alongside Latin to create a much richer apprehension of the way language and literary art can work, and to provide a set of age-old eyes with which to look all that more precisely at the modern world.

In any translated work of literature, much of the artistry is lost. There is simply no way to capture all the nuances of the original language in a translation. Works of poetry especially suffer in translation, because it is very difficult, and in many cases impossible, to preserve the original work’s meter, rhyme scheme, and other poetic devices. Homer’s Odyssey is no exception. Producing an accurate, readable English translation of the Odyssey in dactylic hexameter (The poetic meter of the Iliad and the Odyssey) would be next to impossible. Anyone capable of such a feat probably deserves to have an epic written about him.

(Dr. Bruce McMenomy has kindly provided a recording of these lines for his Greek IV students, which can be listened to here.)

Here is E. V. Rieu’s prose translation (revised by D. C. H. Rieu) of those first ten lines of the Odyssey:

“Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy. He saw the cities of many people and he learnt their ways. He suffered great anguish on the high seas in his struggles to preserve his life and bring his comrades home. But he failed to save those comrades, in spite of all his efforts. It was their own transgression that brought them to their doom, for in their folly they devoured the oxen of Hyperion the Sun-god and he saw to it that they would never return. Tell us this story, goddess daughter of Zeus, beginning at whatever point you will.”

D. C. H. Rieu writes in the preface of E.V. Rieu’s revised translation that his father’s vision “was to make available to the ordinary reader, in good modern English, the great classics of every language”.

Here is Richmond Lattimore’s verse translation of the first ten lines of the Odyssey:

“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
Even so he could not save his companions, hard though
he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,
fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,
and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point
here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story.”

Lattimore, in the introduction to his translation, says, “I have tried to follow, as far as the structure of English will allow, the formulaic practice of the original”.

Here is my own translation of those first ten lines:

“Muse, tell me of a much-travelled man, who wandered very much, after he sacked the holy city of Troy: he saw the cities of many men and he knew their mind, and he suffered many troubles in his heart at sea, while striving to win his own life and the homecoming of his companions. But he did not save his companions, although he was very eager (to do so): for they perished by their own wickedness, the childish fools, who gobbled down the cattle of Helios Hyperion: but he took away the day of homecoming from them. O goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning at any point tell us of these things also.”

The purpose of my translation is merely to show that I have understood what the Greek says and how it says it. It is accurate, but the English is stilted and unidiomatic in some places. For instance, “he knew their mind” is not a typo. The word for mind used in this passage, νόον, is singular. Greek frequently ascribes a collective singular mind or heart to groups, whether they are cities, armies, or companions of Odysseus. It is not idiomatic English, but it is what the Greek says.

There is a clear difference between the three translations I have provided. The translators all achieved their stated purposes, but none of their translations manages to maintain the same rhythm as the original Greek. The ease of reading the translations also varies. Certainly my translation is not one that would be the easiest to read. It is not meant to be a publishable translation, anyway. Of the two published translations, Lattimore’s more closely follows the style of the Odyssey, but it is not as easy to read as Rieu’s. All three fail to capture the nuance and the poetic charm of the Odyssey.

Just five words into the Greek of the Odyssey translators run into some difficulty. The fifth word, πολύτροπον (πολύ, “much, many”, + τρόπος, “turn, direction; way, manner, fashion, guise”), can in this context mean “much-travelled, much-wandering” or “shifty, versatile, wily”. Both senses certainly apply to Odysseus; he travels much and is quite cunning. (In fact, another word Homer frequently uses to describe him is πολύμητις, “of many devices, crafty, shrewd”.) Which sense are we supposed to understand here, though? I would argue that we are meant to understand both senses here; Odysseus is both a wily and a much-wandering man. None of the translations I provided have attempted to translate πολύτροπον to capture both meanings; Lattimore chose to translate it as “of many ways”, Rieu chose “resourceful”, and I chose “much-travelled”. There simply is no single English word that can capture all the senses of the word πολύτροπον.

Puns also do not survive in translation. In Book IX of the Odyssey, when the Cyclops Polyphemus asks Odysseus what his name is, Odysseus answers that his name is “Nobody”. The Greek word he uses is Οὖτις, which, aside from the slight difference in accent, sounds like οὔτις, “nobody”. The word οὔτις suggests another word meaning “nobody”, which is μήτις (sometimes split into μή τις). In turn, μήτις suggests μῆτις, which means “wisdom, skill, craft”.

Later, after Odysseus and his trusty companions blind Polyphemus, Polyphemus cries out to the other Cyclopes in the area. Hearing the racket, they come to his cave and stand outside the door, which is sealed by a large rock. They stand outside and ask him, “What in the world is so great, Polyphemus, that overwhelmed you thus during the holy night and made us sleepless? Truly, is not someone of mortal men driving away your flocks against your will? Truly, is not someone killing you yourself by deceit or force?”

Polyphemus replies, “ὦ φίλοι, Οὖτίς με κτείνει δόλῳ οὐδὲ βίηφιν.” This can be understood in a couple of ways. Polyphemus means, “O friends, this-guy-named-Outis is killing me by deceit, and not by force.” However, because Οὖτίς sounds like οὔτις (the pain-ridden Cyclops was probably not too concerned with proper accentuation, anyway), and because οὐδὲ here can mean either “or” or “and not”, the other Cyclopes understand it as “O friends, nobody is killing me by deceit or by force”.

The other Cyclopes then reply, “If nobody is overpowering you, who are alone—there is no way to avoid an illness from great Zeus; but pray to your father, lord Poseidon.” (There also seems to be an implied “Now shut up and let the rest of us get some sleep!” here as well.) They reply using the words μή τίς, “not anyone”, which again calls to mind the word μῆτις, “wisdom, skill, craft”. Thus Odysseus gives Polyphemus a false name, which saves him from death, and which also reminds us what a clever fellow he is—and nobody reading a translation would know that this pun existed unless it were footnoted. Even if it is footnoted (Rieu’s translation notes the οὔτις/μήτις pun; Lattimore’s does not. Neither translation notes the double meaning of the word οὐδὲ.), the experience is not the same as understanding the joke as one is reading.

Many other aspects of the Odyssey also are lost in translation. Although the names of Homer’s characters are transliterated, without knowing Greek, one would not know that many of the characters’ names often also describe their characters. One of the suitor’s names, Antinoos, is a compound of ἀντί, “opposite, against”, and νόος, “mind, understanding, thought”. The good Phaeacian king’s name is Alkinoos, which means “Brave-minded” or “Minded to help”. Calypso, the nymph who kept Odysseus on her island for several years, has a name that comes from καλύψω, “I will hide”. Thus Homer not only shows us the behavior and actions of his characters, but he even gives many of them names according to their most important characteristics.

In translation, one also misses instances of alliteration and assonance, such as the assonance of “η” in IX. 439, “θήλειαι δὲ μέμηκον ἀνήμελκτοι περὶ σηκούς” (“But the unmilked females were bleating around the pen”). The repetition of “η” (pronounced like the “ai” in “wait” or “bait”) also mimics the sound of bleating sheep.

Although the examples above are hardly exhaustive and only draw on a few small portions of the Odyssey, they should serve as proof that Homer is much better in the original Greek. However, I would also like to point out one final thing that perhaps hasn’t been made clear in this post. Homeric Greek (all Greek, actually) is really fun—even more fun than reading Homer’s works in translation. I realize that “fun” is a subjective experience, but I offer two solid, objective facts to support this:

The Greek IV 2011-2012 class (which I am a part of) finished all the assignments for the class on April 27th. We were given the option of either stopping there and having a few weeks off before the exam was sent out, or continuing to meet and translate more of the Odyssey. This extra translating would not show up on the exam and would not affect our grades in any way whatsoever. If some students did not want to continue, but others did, that would be fine, and Dr. McM would be available for those who wanted to keep translating. All six students chose to continue translating.

Dr. Bruce McMenomy thinks that teaching Greek IV is so fun that it is even worth being awake at 6 AM for him to teach it on Tuesdays and Fridays—even after all the assigned work is finished and we are only translating for the fun of it.

Okay…now for something a mite silly. Of the various things I’ve published in one medium or another over the years, the one that people still e-mail me asking about is not actually anything serious — but this. It’s not widely available any more, so I thought I’d put it where those who want it can find it. It may also give my students in Latin IV and Western Literature to Dante something to chuckle at. I submitted it to a list of Latinists back in 1995, in response to a double-dactyl contest that had been announced there. For those who were looking for it, here it is. For those who just stumbled on it, I hope you enjoy it. For those who consider me humorless…perhaps you’re right. For those who find it out of place in this serious context…well, flip ahead to the next item or back to the last one…

I realize that the deadline for the double-dactyl competition has come and gone. I also realize that these do not qualify as Proper Double-Dactyls because:

a) there is an irregular overlapping of the sense occasionally into the first verse, which is properly off-limits to all but the obligatory nonsense, and

b) I have dispensed summarily (though, I think, for good cause) with the placement of a name in the second line of every stanza (a concession that cost three permanent punches on my poetic license — but I suspect it’s about to be revoked anyway).

Nevertheless, they do preserve the other features of the form, and constitute a cycle, as it were, of Almost-proper Double-Dactyls, maintaining a one-to-one correspondence of stanza to book of the Aeneid, something that has not, to my knowledge, been attempted before. One wonders why.

Their propriety on other, less formal, grounds, I decline to consider, and encourage the reader to do the same. The fact that they are only slightly and/or obscurely salacious (and not at all vicious) will strike some as a virtue, others as a deficiency; it is, for the time being, an unalterable function of my own mild and retiring nature. I must accordingly leave it to my readers to pronounce on the eligibility of these nugae for admission to the elect and spiritually rarefied company of classic double-dactyls.

To do so will of course require a certain amount of imaginative energy, since the corpus comprises so few real classics. The same task has already caused some discomfort for the author. Though one is inevitably stimulated by the freedom of a new species of verse, still it is a pity that this one is itself so young and its traditions so relatively slight, and there are so few verses eligible for allusive parody. We must manufacture them by exercising the power of hypothesis to — nay, beyond — its furthest reasonable extent. Then, what wonders emerge! Who can imagine what an Archilochus could have done with so potent a form in a siege: who can doubt that he would have reduced whole poleis by suicide, making that cast-off shield of his unnecessary? What clear little rivulets might Callimachus not have fashioned on this irrational bipedal Parnassus? What ripe mysteries could not Sappho have enclosed within the ambit of the Aeolic Iggledy Piggledy?

And yet my particular undertaking here is an epic one, and of a Latinate mold as well. It presumes (for sake of argument) all those Hellenic and Hellenistic antecedents and more. It presumes as well an entire early history of Latin double-dactyls, and invites us to suppose them as we may. It is obvious on reflection, surely, that the twelve thousand Ennian double-dactyls that never made it into Warmington’s collection would have afforded an unparallelled mine of six-syllable words, elaborately compounded by insertion, one into another. It seems similarly apparent that Lucretius could have written double-dactyls without much altering his general procedure at all. And imagine, for a moment, the Catullan hexasyllabic in all of its pumicexpolitous glory — darkly ironic and bitterly playful. What a lot we have lost to the fact that the double-dactyl was not contrived sooner. I like to think that these very verses here presented (rendered dashingly into Latin, of course) would have afforded Vergil himself a quicker and easier, if not a better, recusatio when pestered by Augustus to produce an epic. Surely the Princeps would have known better than to ask for more. And this is but the beginning. What could the Nachleben of such a work have been? Would Augustine have wept over the fourth double-dactyl? I think not. He’d have had to confess other things. Would Dante have sought another guide, or would the Divine Comedy have been much more comedic, and much less divine?

Be that as it may, it is our mortal lot to patch up as we can the deficiencies of the past, and to this mighty and thankless work I have here set my hand. Lest I appear a mere Johnny-come-lately to this particular area of historical repair, I hasten to point out that the first version of this nugatory opus had in fact been completed before I learned of the similar (and wholly admirable) efforts of some of my colleagues to render the Iliad into limericks. It seems fitting, though, that whereas that has been an accretive product of many authors’ labors (one might say an instance of traditional poetry, growing in our midst, even while we debate whether such a thing is possible), my contribution, like the poem on which it is modeled, is the product of a single vision, howso astigmatic: which is to say, I bear the blame for it entirely myself. That its relationship to its model is one of Very Free Interpretation is granted, and need not, I think, be pointed out in any critical essays; note of all other defects, real or imagined, should be carefully written down and sent to dev.null@nowhere.edu, where they will receive the attention they deserve. In conclusion, I should also warn one and all that any attempt at Deconstruction by anyone anywhere, with or without the proper credentials, will be vigorously resisted to the fullest extent permitted under the prevailing laws.

Which being said, for the amusement of those of my fellow Latinists still possessed of a sense of the absurd (which, given the state of the discipline, must be most of us), I offer the following:

The previous entry on this blog was about failure not being an option — and I subscribe to that. Failure in an ultimate sense is something we should never choose for ourselves: the universe or some other person may well cause us to fail but we should not elect to fail in a final sense. Nevertheless, failure, and the freedom to fail in the short run without disastrous long-term consequences, is essential to learning. I have taught students with a whole range of abilities and inclinations over the years; there have been some who have been afraid to venture on anything, lest they fail to complete it to some arbitrary standard of perfection. Others tear into the subject with giddy abandon, making mistakes freely and without compunction. Of the two groups, it is invariably the latter that gets the job done. The students in the former group are frozen by fear or reverence for some external standard of excellence or perfection, and they really cannot or will not transcend that fear.

It may seem odd that, while I consider education to be one of the more important activities one can engage in throughout life, it’s actually the model of the game that speaks most directly to what’s going on here. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in a marvelous little book called Homo Ludens, explores the notion of game and gaming in historical cultures. He identifies a number of salient features — but chief among them are two facts: first, that the universe of the game is somehow set apart, a kind of sacred precinct, and, second, that what goes on there does not effectively leave that arena. I think the same can be said of education — and, interestingly, the idea of education as a game is of long standing: the Roman word that most commonly was applied to the school was ludus, which is also the most common word for game or play.

Who doesn’t know at least one student who loves to play games, and who may be remarkably expert in them, but still has difficulty engaging the subjects he or she is nominally studying seriously? In my experience, it’s more the norm than the exception. I’ve heard people decry that fact as a sign of the sorry state into which the world has fallen — but I don’t think that’s all, or even most, of the picture. One of the things that sets games apart from other learning activities is that in a game, one is encouraged, or even required, to try things, in the relative certainty that, at first at least, one is going to make an awful mess of most of them. That’s okay. You get to do it again, and again, and again, if need be.

Within the bounds of the game, one is free to fail. Even there, one should not choose to fail: doing that subverts the game as nothing else ever could. But even if one is trying to win, failure comes easily and frequently, but without serious penalty. The consequence, though, is that students learn quickly enough how not to fail. The idea that one must get everything right the first time is nonsense. The creeping fear that one needs to score 100 on every quiz is nonsense. Even the belief that the highest grade signifies the best education is nonsense. Sure, I have had some students who got extraordinarily high grades and were very engaged with the material; I have had some students who were completely disengaged and got miserable scores. But those are the easy cases, and they are relatively few. The mixed cases are interesting and hard. I’ve had a few who operated the system in order to get good scores, but never really closed with the material. They walked away with a grade — though usually not the best grade — and little else. I wish it were possible to prevent tweaking the system this way, but it often is not. In the end, though, like the student at UCLA Christe recounted in the previous post, they achieved a real failure because they chose it: they sacrificed the substance of their education in order to win a favorable report on the education. It’s a bad trade — yet another instance of the means becoming autonomous.

I have also had other students — probably more of them than in any of the other groups — who thrashed about, and had real difficulty with the material, but kept bashing at it, and wound up making real strides, and in a meaningful sense winning the battle. Christe talked about how a baby learning to walk is taught by the unforgiving nature of gravity. That’s true enough. Gravity is exacting: its rules never waver, and so it may be unforgiving in that regard. It’s also very forgiving in another sense, however. Falling once or even a thousand times doesn’t keep you down or make you more likely to fall the next time. Every time you fall, assuming you haven’t injured yourself critically, you are free to get up again and keep on trying. And perhaps you have learned something this time. If not, give it another go.

Children learning to speak succeed with such amazing speed not in spite of but because of their abundant mistakes. They are forming concepts about the language, and testing and refining them by playing with it so recklessly. A child who learns that “I walked” is a way of putting “I walk” into the past will quite reasonably assume that “I runned” is a way of putting “I run” into the past. This may be local and small-scale setback when it comes to identifying the right verb form for the task: it most definitely is not failure in a larger sense. It’s a triumph. Sure, it’s incorrect English. It is, nevertheless, the vindication of that child’s language-forming capacity, and the ability to abstract general principles from specific instances. He or she will eventually learn about strong verbs. But such engagement with what one wants to say, and such fearlessness in expressing it, is rocket fuel for the mind. The child learns to speak the way a devoted gamer learns a game — through immersion and unquestioning involvement, untainted by the slightest fear of the failure that invariably, repeatedly attends the enterprise.

When I first started teaching Greek I and II online about fifteen years ago, I came up with what seemed to me a rather innovative plan for the final for the course. Over the years since I haven’t altered it much, because of all the things I’ve ever done as a teacher, it seems to have been one of the most successful. Though in recent years Sarah Miller Esposito has taken Greek I and II over from me, I believe that she’s still doing roughly the same thing, too. I set the final up as a huge, exhaustive survey of virtually everthing covered in the course — especially the mechanical things. All the declensions, all the conjugations, all the pronoun forms, and so on, became part of that final exam. It took many hours to complete. I eventually even gave up having other exams throughout the year. Everything (in terms of grade) could hang from the final.

Everything for a year depending on a final? For a high school student? This sounds like a nightmare. I’ve had parents balk and complain — but seldom students: not when they’ve been through it and seen the results. Here’s the trick: the student was allowed to take that exam throughout the summer, as many times as he or she wanted. It could be taken with the book in the lap, with an answer sheet propped up next to the computer; students could discuss the contents with one another, or ask me for answers (though they seldom needed to: I put the number of the relevant section in the book next to each question). The results of each pass could be reviewed, and each section could be retaken as many times as desired. The only requirement was this — the last time any given section of the exam (I think there are eighteen sections, some of them worth several hundred points each) was taken, it had to be taken under exam conditions: closed book, with no outside sources. The final version had to come in by Sept. 1. Students were free to complete it at any point prior: most of them didn’t. Why should they? They were playing the game, and improving their scores. They actually rather liked it. Especially after I was able to get these exam segments running under the Moodle, so that scoring was instantaneous and painless (frankly there’s little that’s as excruciating for a teacher to grade by hand as accented polytonic Greek), they did it a lot. They’d take each segment four, five, perhaps even ten times.

The results of this were, from a statistical point of view, probably ridiculous. It tended to produce a spread of scores ranging from a low of about 98.3 to a high of about 99.9. Nobody left without an A. “What kind of grade inflation is this?” one might ask. But the simple (and exhilarating) fact was that they all came back to class in the fall ready to perform like A students. They had the material down cold — and they hadn’t forgotten it all over the summer either. This is not just my own assessment: they went on to win national competitions, and to gain admission to some of the most prestigious universities in the country — where at least some of them tested into upper division classics courses right away. If that’s grade inflation, so be it. I like to think rather that it’s education inflation. We could use a little more of that. I don’t really take credit for it myself — it’s not that I was such a brilliant teacher. I’m not even primarily a Hellenist — I’m a Latinist. But I credit the fact that they became engaged with it as if with a game.

We live in a society with a remarkably strong gaming culture; but most historical societies have had the same thing. We have surviving games from Egypt and Greece and Rome; chess comes from ancient India and Persia, and go (probably the only game to match chess for complexity from simplicity) from ancient China and Japan. We have ancient African games, and ancient Native American games. Today the videogame industry is a multibillion dollar affair. Board games, card games, sporting equipment, and every other form of game equipment is marketed and consumed with a rare zeal. These products find buyers even in a downturn economy, because they appeal to something very fundamental about who we are. Even while the educational establishment seems to be ever more involved in protecting the fragile ego and self-image of the learner, our games don’t tell us pretty lies. They don’t tell us that we’ll win every time. They tell us we’ll fail and have to keep trying if we want to win. I really think that people savor that honesty, and that the lesson to be learned from it is enormously significant.

I know that there are a lot of things that people have had to say against games, and certainly an undue or inappropriate preoccupation with them may not be a good thing. Nevertheless, they are genuine part of our God-given nature, and they form, I would argue, one of our most robust models for learning. In games we are free to fail: and that freedom fosters the ability to learn, which is ultimately the legitimate freedom to win. If we can extract any lesson from our games, and perhaps apply it more broadly to the sphere of learning, I think we all will benefit.

Last May I wrote a piece for this blog entitled “Autonomy of Means and Education”. The choice of phrasing was drawn from Charles WIlliams, “Bors to Elayne, on the King’s Coins”. I’ve recently had reason to revisit the question again, from a different direction.

I’ve just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. Some may consider it ironic that I discovered this book at the recommendation of some friends via Facebook: it is an extended (and not particularly optimistic) meditation on how the Internet is “rewiring” our minds — making quantifiable and physically measurable changes in our brains — by the kinds of information it delivers, and the way it delivers it.

Carr’s main point is fairly straightforward, and very hard to refute from common experience: he contends that the rapid-fire interruption-machine that the Internet offers us tends to fragment our attention, perpetually redirect us to the superficial, and prevent us from achieving any of the continuous long-term concentration from which emerge real ideas, serious discourse, and, in the long view, civilization itself. Not only is it not conducive to such thinking in and of itself — it actually suppresses our capacity for such thinking even when we’re away from our computers. Carr doesn’t point fingers or lay particularly onerous burdens of blame at anyone’s door, though one is moved to wonder cui bono? — to whom is all this a benefit, and where is the money coming from? There is a curious unquestioned positivist philosophy driving companies like Google that is not consistent with at least how I see myself in relation to my God, and the other people in his world.

Carr supports his case with a dazzling array of synthetic arguments ranging from the philosophical to the neuropsychological. He makes a very convincing case for the plasticity of the human brain, even into adulthood — and for the notion that those capacities that get exercise tend to be enhanced through measurable growth and synaptic enhancement of specific areas of the brain. All this can happen in remarkably short time (mere days or even hours). My own field is rather far removed from psychology, but what he says rings true with me — my ability do do almost any kind of mental activity really does improve with practice. Unused abilities, by the same token, can atrophy. That this happens is probably not very surprising to any of us; what is surprising is its extent and the objectivity with which it can be measured. I was intrigued to learn, for example, that one can identify particular developments characteristic of the brains of taxi-drivers, and that discernible physical differences distinguish the brains of readers of Italian, for example, from readers of English. We tend to think of language as largely convertible from one to another; it’s not necessarily so. Whether this has some other implications about why one ought to learn Latin or Greek is intriguing to me, but not something I’m going to chase down here.

Carr’s thesis, if it’s true, has serious consequences for us at Scholars Online. It has implications about who we are and how we do what we are doing. As a teacher who has found his calling trying to teach people to read carefully and thoughtfully, analytically and critically, with concentration and focus — via the Internet — I naturally feel torn. I like to believe that the format in which I’m pursuing that work is not itself militating against its success. It is at the very least a strong warning that we should examine how we work and why we do what we do the way we do it.

I do feel somewhat vindicated in the fact that we have never chosen to pursue each and every new technological gewgaw that came down the pike. Our own concern has always been for cautiously adopting appropriate technology. I still tend not to direct students to heavily linked hypertext documents (which, as Carr argues, provide vastly less benefit than they promise, with substantially lower retention than simple linear documents in prose); almost anything that requires the division or fragmentation of attention is an impediment to real learning. As I have said elsewhere in my discussions of the literature program, my main effort there has always been to teach students to read carefully and thoroughly — not just the mechanics of decoding text, but the skills of interpreting and understanding its meaning.

The book is not without a few technical flaws. Carr has either misread or misinterpreted some of the points in Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Many of his claims about Latin and the development of the manuscript are too facile, and some are simply incorrect. Saenger points out that in Classical Latin, word order makes relatively little syntactic difference. He’s using that distinction precisely. Carr apparently takes this to mean that, as a function of the way manuscripts were written and produced in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, there was less concern for discrete idenitification of word boundaries (likely to be true), and less concern for word order in a given text (completely preposterous). Yes, it’s true that Latin syntax does not rely as heavily as English does on word order; it’s not true that word order is without significance semantically. The fact that many of our survivals from ancient sources are poetic would clearly argue against this: if you rearrange the words in a line of Vergil, you will destroy the meter, if nothing else. Word order in poetry is essential for meter (something we can verify objectively); it’s also powerful poetically. Words echo each other only if they stand in a certain arrangment; this one will be left enjambed at the beginning of a new line with potent poetical effect.

To this day, I have had from no other poet the same artistic pleasure that one of Horace’s Odes gave me from the beginning. In some languages, what Horace accomplished here could not even be hoped for. This mosaic of words, where each word — [understood] as sound, as place, and as idea — exerts its influence to the right and left and over the whole, this economy in the extent and number of the signs, through which those signs receive their greatest power — that is all Roman and, to my way of thinking, supremely noble.(Twilight of the Gods, “What I owe to the Ancients”, 1. Tr. my own.)

Nietzsche was a very strange philosopher (if that’s even the right term to describe him); I don’t hold with many of his ideas. But he was actually a pretty astute reader of Horace.

Cicero’s orations — not poetry — were similarly characterized by prose rhythms and semantic subtleties that could not possibly have been preserved were the scribes or copyists indifferent to word order. Whether we’re dealing with poetry or prose, word order is ultimately no less important in Latin than in English. It just has a different importance. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Carr also routinely refers to Socrates as an orator, which is certainly not how Socrates viewed himself. He correctly notes that Socrates eschewed writing, partly because (as is discussed in the Phaedrus, one of the weirder Platonic dialogues), the old Egyptian priest claimed that it tended to weaken the memory. This is true, but it’s only one of Socrates’ reasons. He also disdained writing and oratory both because they were one-way forms of communication. What he valued (as can be found elsewhere throughout his work) is the give-and-take of two-way conversation: in the Greek, διαλέγεσθαι (dialegesthai) — the root of our own “dialogue” and “dialectic”. He believed that the exchange was uniquely capable of allowing people to dig out the truth.

In the Apology (which I’m now reading with some terrific students in Greek III), Socrates specifically and fairly extensively begs to be excused from having to talk like an orator. This is how the dialogue begins:

How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know; but I, for my part, almost forgot my own identity, so persuasively did they talk; and yet there is hardly a word of truth in what they have said. But I was most amazed by one of the many lies that they told—when they said that you must be on your guard not to be deceived by me, because I was a clever speaker. For I thought it the most shameless part of their conduct that they are not ashamed because they will immediately be convicted by me of falsehood by the evidence of fact, when I show myself to be not in the least a clever speaker, unless indeed they call him a clever speaker who speaks the truth; for if this is what they mean, I would agree that I am an orator—not after their fashion. Now they, as I say, have said little or nothing true; but you shall hear from me nothing but the truth. Not, however, men of Athens, speeches finely tricked out with words and phrases, as theirs are, nor carefully arranged, but you will hear things said at random with the words that happen to occur to me. For I trust that what I say is just; and let none of you expect anything else. For surely it would not be fitting for one of my age to come before you like a youngster making up speeches. And, men of Athens, I urgently beg and beseech you if you hear me making my defence with the same words with which I have been accustomed to speak both in the market place at the bankers tables, where many of you have heard me, and elsewhere, not to be surprised or to make a disturbance on this account. For the fact is that this is the first time I have come before the court, although I am seventy years old; I am therefore an utter foreigner to the manner of speech here. Hence, just as you would, of course, if I were really a foreigner, pardon me if I spoke in that dialect and that manner in which I had been brought up, so now I make this request of you, a fair one, as it seems to me, that you disregard the manner of my speech—for perhaps it might be worse and perhaps better—and observe and pay attention merely to this, whether what I say is just or not; for that is the virtue of a judge, and an orator’s virtue is to speak the truth. (Plat. Apol., 17a-18a, tr. Harold North Fowler).

One of the things that struck me while I was reading the latter stretches of this book was the subject I raised last May: when a tool — any tool — becomes autonomous, we’re heading for trouble with it. We pour much of who and what we are into our tools, and the making of tools is apparently very much a part of our nature as human beings. We are homo faber — man the maker — as much as we are homo sapiens. That is, as I take it, a good thing. With our tools we have been able to do many things that are worth doing, and that could not have been done otherwise. But we must always hold our tools accountable to our higher purposes. The mere fact that one can do something with a given tool does not mean that it’s a good thing. They say the man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail. That adage still holds good. We can be empowered by our tools, but every one comes at a cost — a cost to us in terms of who we are and how we work, and what ends our work ultimately serves. There is some power in choosing not to use certain tools on certain occasions.

Though not as well known as his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams (1886–1945) was nevertheless an active member of the Inklings throughout most of its lifetime, and displayed a powerful, if somewhat eccentric, spiritual insight. He wrote seven odd metaphysical novels that haven’t ever quite caught the imagination of mainstream readers, but which have had a fervent following among a few; he also wrote a number of plays and various works of literary analysis, and The Descent of the Dove, a history of the Holy Spirit in the church. It would be hard to imagine a more daring enterprise.

He also wrote two slim volumes of poetry. His poetic style is odd, his imagery occasionally encumbered with a kind of private symbolic vocabulary that defies casual analysis, and his points are frequently highly abstract and obscure. For all that, I personally think that these two books — Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944) — are the pinnacle of his creative achievement. He was admired by such prominent poetic luminaries as W.H. Auden, who wrote a kind of hommage to him on his death. But Williams’ unique power, I think, comes largely from his capacity to articulate transcendent truths that slice through every aspect of life — often drawing steely, almost brutally realistic distinctions that are nevertheless rooted in the love of Christ.

Partway through the first of those volumes is a poem entitled “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins”. It is about the introduction of a money economy into an abstracted kind of Arthurian Britain (which he refers to by its older name “Logres”). From the middle of that poem comes the following passage (the dragons are the images stamped on the coins):

They laid the coins before the council.
Kay, the king’s steward, wise in economics, said:
“Good; these cover the years and the miles
and talk one style’s dialects to London and Omsk.
Traffic can hold now and treasure be held,
streams are bridged and mountains of ridged space
tunnelled; gold dances deftly across frontiers.
The poor have choice of purchase, the rich of rents,
and events move now in a smoother control
than the swords of lords or the orisons of nuns.
Money is the medium of exchange.”

Taliessin’s look darkened; his hand shook
while he touched the dragons; he said, “We had a good thought.
Sir, if you made verse you would doubt symbols.
I am afraid of the little loosed dragons.
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words
escape from verse they hurry to rape souls;
when sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant;
the brood of carriers levels the good they carry.
We have taught our images to be free; are we glad?
are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?”

Ever since I first encountered these words more than thirty years ago, they have resonated with me — and in particular the line, “When the means are autonomous, they are deadly.” In almost every aspect of life today, we can see evidence of its truth.

It’s as true in economics, I think, as it ever was — as Williams first envisioned it. A preoccupation with money rather than actual goods and services — price as opposed to value — enables the twin banes of inflation and depression that have become all too familiar to us in recent years; it allows manipulation of currency as a tertium quid, essentially sundered from the goods and services themselves and from the human beings to whom they are meaningful or essential. In politics more broadly, I think, we daily see examples of means — offices, commisions, departments, or even whole governments, set up for noble reasons — that have, over time, become ends in themselves. They now exist less to advance the causes for which they were founded than to perpetuate themselves and to aggrandize their own power. One could make a similar argument for many unions, charitable organizations, political parties, businesses, or even schools: in short, for almost any of the human institutions that crowd and confuse our frail fallen world. The underlying pattern is the same. Things created to be means have become autonomous — ends in themselves, answerable to nobody.

I don’t want to become mired in the bog of elaborating on this politically: I have my own opinions, and so, probably, do you. Whatever your beliefs, there are probably a number of places where you can easily produce a ringing denunciation of these means-turned-ends. Your list might not be the same as mine, but there would probably be some overlap. In many cases it’s pretty clear that not only are these entities, whatever they are, no longer serving the good at which they originally aimed, but that they are actually subverting it. They stand in a kind of rebellion from their initial purposes. When it happens, we wind up spiraling downward into a kind of idolatrous service of the means rather than the end.

But I do think it’s worth looking at how this phenomenon intersects with our common goals here of enabling and supporting classical Christian education. Educational institutions, practices, and procedures are not exempt from this broad tendency, which is, after all, a reflection of our nature as fallen beings. Herewith are a handful of reflections on how that concerns us here and now.

Perhaps the most obvious case in point is the matter of grades. Grades are, like money, a medium of exchange. That’s all. They are only a medium, however, and of no intrinsic value. They presumably enable us to compare this student with that one and to come up with a kind of relative determination of their achievement, worth, or so on. From a Christian point of view, of course, that’s rather grotesquely misguided: that anyone could presume to evaluate another person’s worth in an absolute sense, when Christ died for each of us equally and entirely, is preposterous: but we may do it all the same, while masking the reality with comfortable rhetoric. It’s not about the students’ value, we say, but about their achievement. Fair enough: but people still tend to use the term as if it were evaluative of the person. Moreover, what we don’t admit nearly as freely as we should is the fact that the grades don’t reflect the students’ achievement or learning in a more than superficial way, either.

Sooner or later — usually sooner — this dichotomy will drive us to a parting of the ways. I have had parents withdraw students from my classes on the grounds that, though (they admitted) I was providing their children with a better educational experience, in which they were learning more and understanding more deeply, they really were sure that they would get better grades from someone less rigorous. That’s probably true. I should also say that I have also had parents tell me that they valued the substance of what we were delivering over the easy grade.

A grade for a course is only a way — a very reductive way — of measuring, quantifying, and talking about achievement. It is not, however, the achievement itself. It is a purely derivative good, and entirely without value on its own. Worrying about the grade in preference to worrying about the education that it supposedly represents is a bizarre substitution of the sign for the signified. It makes about as much sense as going to a restaurant on the grounds that, though the food is inferior, the menu seems better, or the man who convinced himself he was losing weight by redefining the pound to be twenty ounces.

At first blush, this seems comical, but self-deception is always, in the long run, a grave matter, and contains the seeds of tragedy, in both earthly and spiritual terms. It eventually leads us to a kind of idolatry of the signifier, while disregarding the thing signified. It propagates up and down the whole hierarchy of being and of our experience, and eventually will — as it must — taint our relationship with God.

A similar phenomenon is the frenzy of attention attaching to Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Someone, somewhere, has been telling (especially homeschooled) students and their parents that they really need AP credits by the truckload to be in contention for admission to any kind of good college. U. S. News and World Report rates high schools on the basis of how many AP courses they offer; certainly the College Board itself is not going to play down the importance of a multi-million-dollar industry that is making it (another now-autonomous means to an end) more powerful every year. This is further heightened by the fact that many schools compute the grade point average (GPA) in such a way that a B in an AP class is equivalent to an A in anything else; an A in an AP class gets one a 5.0 on a four-point scale. It’s insurance to assure that the GPA doesn’t dip below 4.0. One bogus marker becomes convertible with another. None of them any longer has much to do with learning.

In the increasingly frenetic pursuit of these brass rings, though, fewer and fewer seem to be stopping to consider that they really are just brass. Who is fooling whom here? One of the purposes of education, it seems to me, should have to do with cultivating the ability to distinguish the genuine article from the dross.

We’re trying to do that at Scholars Online (doubtless with limited success, but we’re trying). We offer grades because people demand them, but I confess I remain uneasy about the whole process. I’d much rather graduate class after class of people who were so excellent that no grade other than an A would be appropriate, but at that point it would lose its comparative punch. Similarly, we offer some A.P. courses because people want them, and because we’ve concluded that the curricula have been established on pretty solid grounds. In other cases, we’ve made the decision not to pursue A.P. status because the A.P. curriculum definition either seems intractable or pedagogically unsound, or would in effect entail a dumbing-down of what we’re doing. A majority of the students in my Senior English class go on to take the A.P. exam in Literature and Composition, and they normally do quite well. But it’s not required, and I don’t bill it as an A.P. course. After a few passes through the College Board’s review process, I determined that in order to meet their criteria, I would have to remove a good deal of the substance of the course to enable extensive rewriting exercises that are not, to my way of thinking, the best way of spending our limited time. One can agree with that decision or disagree with it: I respect that. But that disagreement should be about the substance of the educational experience, not because there’s any real pedagogical value to having the letters “AP” on a transcript.

If classical education is worth anything, it is about seeing past the superficial to the essential. Ideally it’s taking a stand against a culture of superficiality. The value of any part of your education is not, contrary to popular opinion, in its ability to lever you into a position to get more of it somewhere else, or even a job down the line. If it has no intrinsic value, scrap it. If it has that value, grab onto it and hold on tight.

As a Christian, I believe that education is for us ultimately a matter of helping us fulfill our real life goal — in Greek philosophical vocabulary, our telos — as created beings, which is to serve and to glorify God. It is to enable us to grow more fully into that personhood for which he created and redeemed us. It’s not just to get a good job, it’s not just to get more schooling.

Williams introduces Taliessin Through Logres with an epigraph from Dante’s Latin treatise entitled De monarchia: Unde est, quod non operatio propria propter essentiam, sed haec propter illam habet ut sit. Translated a mite loosely, that is: “Therefore it is that the proper function [of any given thing] does not get its reason for being from its essence, but the latter from the former.” It’s a demanding, humbling perception that gets tougher and chewier the longer you think about it. But I think it’s entirely correct.

I will try to follow up on this theme more in particular in the coming weeks.